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Training neural networks under physical constraints using a stochastic augmented Lagrangian approach

Computational Physics 2020-09-17 v1 Machine Learning Optimization and Control Plasma Physics Machine Learning

Abstract

We investigate the physics-constrained training of an encoder-decoder neural network for approximating the Fokker-Planck-Landau collision operator in the 5-dimensional kinetic fusion simulation in XGC. To train this network, we propose a stochastic augmented Lagrangian approach that utilizes pyTorch's native stochastic gradient descent method to solve the inner unconstrained minimization subproblem, paired with a heuristic update for the penalty factor and Lagrange multipliers in the outer augmented Lagrangian loop. Our training results for a single ion species case, with self-collisions and collision against electrons, show that the proposed stochastic augmented Lagrangian approach can achieve higher model prediction accuracy than training with a fixed penalty method for our application problem, with the accuracy high enough for practical applications in kinetic simulations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.07330,
  title  = {Training neural networks under physical constraints using a stochastic augmented Lagrangian approach},
  author = {Alp Dener and Marco Andres Miller and Randy Michael Churchill and Todd Munson and Choong-Seock Chang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.07330},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:34:12.200Z